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eDimensional Wired 3D Glasses Review
Julio writes "Today at TechSpot we have reviewed eDimensional's Wired 3D Glasses, based on the original 3D Stereo technology that became popular a few years ago, these revamped version of the glasses seem to offer much more value and compatibility to the table. Adding amazing effects to games we tested which include Jedi Outcast and some other racing and flight simulators, this item could easily make it into your holiday shop list...
"The images looked very cool, and I spent about 10 minutes gawking at my new surroundings. After playing around with Jedi Outcast, I was ready for more. I checked the supported game list, and just about every game I had was listed there.""
These things always give me a head-ache. Also, how do people with glasses manage with these?
I'll only buy these if they support my favorite porn sites and virtual girlfriend games...
I worked at SGI for a while - they had stereo goggles years ago, even had a couple of pairs lying around. No one used them at all because they gave people SEVERE headaches....
But I currently have them up for sale. After purchasing them, I tried to get them to work with my ATI Radeon, and it had limited support.
It worked great for browsing the 3D pictures on their website, but when it came to games, nothing I did could get it to work properly.
I then tried it on my friends NVIDIA card, and we got quake3 working, and I have to admit, it is a lot better than the previous 3d glasses (ie; asus). After playing with them and being amazed for about 30 minutes, all I could really think though was 'novelty'. They didn't enhance game play in any way, and it actually took relearning some of my trained reactions in quake3.
Unfortunately my main goal was to get it working in Dungeon Siege, and I could never accomplish that.
2.5 stars/5
eDimensional means 2.71828dimensional.
It could be as simple as one eye with a cataract (cloudy vision), so you begin to rely solely on one eye.
Wake me when they start to have glasses that can fire lasers into your eye to display images. It could possibly bypass the cataract and other ocular anomalies.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
this. These were originally developed for helicopter sims, when you're flying a 10 ton bird 10 meters off the earth at 200 knots, depth perception becomes very important.
Of course, now they cost a lot less than $10,000 a pair.
The funny part is just how many anti-globalization peaceniks who hate the militray would just cream their Guatamalen pants to play with these, I guess military stuff is bad, unless you find it entertaining.
... would these glasses make my bash prompt look any better? Or emacs, for that matter.
Hate me!
Amount of fun provided by 3-D glasses (1 to 100)
divided by
Inverse of number of minutes until splitting headache
equals
Headache Quotient Factor
Hopefully HQF is > than 1000.
I was only able to get the first page before the Slashdotting killed it. Here ya go...
Computers offer the best and most impressive gaming graphics, besting any other console found on today's market; however as of late we have the PC losing some ground as a gaming platform due to impressive development efforts from the popular console makers; a relatively new system with a powerful graphics card offers the most realistic graphics you'll ever lay your eyes on.
Not satisfied with that, PC gamers are always looking for the next best thing to enhance their visual experience. Some might purchase a flat screen monitor; others may choose a faster graphics card which handles higher resolutions. Now that your system is decked out to the hilt, what's next? Well, companies like eDimensional hope you will eventually add some 3D Gaming glasses to the mix.
3D glasses have been out for some time now, but the technology is getting better with every release. Companies like NVIDIA continue to update drivers to improve the 3D gaming experience, which has many companies believing that some day all gamers will own a pair. So is this really the next best thing, or will this leave you looking like a geek for nothing?
Today I'll be reviewing a pair of 3D glasses made by a company called eDimensional. The company was founded in 2000, mainly focusing on enhancing the multimedia experience. They call their 3D technology E-D, and promise it to supply you with an amazing submersive 3D environment. One of the main reasons I decided to review this product was to see how it compared to the DTI 2015XLS 3D LCD Display I reviewed not so long ago, if you can recall that expensive gadget costs nothing less but $1700.
How It Works
I don't know the technical lingo to explain how 3D works, but I'll sum it up as best I can. Basically, people have two eyes and your eyes see things from a perspective when looking at objects depending on their locations, which is called binocular disparity. One eye sees one side of an object, and the other eye sees the other side. Your brain uses both views to create one three dimensional image. So this means the depth you actually see is just a perception of what the brain thinks it is; it may not actually be the true look of an image. Pretty weird stuff, eh?
Anyhow, the E-D system shows you a two eye view from your computer monitor. The depth-of-field is simulated using shutter-glasses with lenses that can alternate between clean and opaque (blocks light). While using the glasses, a left eye image is first displayed on a computer monitor, and the shutter-glasses left lens is clear, while the right lens is dark. The image on the monitor is then switched to the right-eye view, and the lens of the shutter-glasses is reversed. This switching occurs many times per second, fast enough for your eyes not to notice it. Your brain fuses the separate images together to create 3D. Yes, it's just your brains perception of what the image should look like. Pretty neat how we can trick the brain, don't you think?
by closing one eye.
I used to work for a small company called 3DTV that was a splinter group from Sterographics. I worked on software and marketing for hte first round of consumer shutter glasses, back when you had to use DOS (as in C:\) becuase Windows couldn't do page flipping synced to the monitor refresh rate (one flip per refresh). I for one was allways very fond of this tech', provided that you ran at 120hz or higher so that each eye is getting a full 60hz. In addition you need to turn off any other light source as even a basic light build has a refresh that can cause headaches if it is not in sync with the monitor (imagine every 10th frame being darker in one eye). Its very good to still see this stuff around.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
What are the best glasses to use with a Powerbook G4? I want to use the glasses for a molecular graphics visualization under the program Pymol, using OS X. Anybody have any expereince and recomendations?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Why on earth would I need a pair of these glasses when I already have the perfect headache inducing piece of kit in this ?
I think later versions came with a free pack of aspirins.
I bought 2 sets of wireless LCD shutter glasses when I bought a TNT2 card from Elsa a few years ago. The most important thing with these is to ensure your monitor can do at least 100 hz refresh at the resolution you want. Any less will give you flicker and headaches. Personally I run most things at 800x600@140 hz and 1024x768@110 hz. The resolution isn't as nice as 1600x1200 but the immersion of being "there" is worth it.
Make sure your room is dark as any other light will make your eyes go goofy, especially the flicker you'll see with 60Hz fluorescent tubes.
nVidia now has native drivers for their cards and the old Elsa glasses work great with my new(er) GeForce 2 card. The older Elsa drivers and the new nVidia ones just use a DX &| GL hack to shift the axis of your eyes every other frame so the appropriate eye is blocked by the LCD during drawing.
They're the best thing for gaming, IMHO.
Trolling is a art,
Heard in the basement of the parents house of the guy who houses the Tech Spot server...
Julio: "Oh man, these glasses are trick! That image of a burning server looks TOTALLY real.
Franko:Dude, you took the glasses off 10 minutes ago. That IS our server.
If they could make 3d glasses, that allowed me to peer around corners in Quake, or other 3D Shooters, i'd Bite... But intill then, i think i'll pass.
I will however, take enjoyment in watching others bend their necks and lean in funny directions, as their brain trys to look around the 3D corners. Reminds me of my wife playing Mario Kart, swinging the SNES Controller around, leaning into corners....
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
I bought a set of Elsa Revalator glasses a while ago that use the same basic lcd shutter technology. They do "work" but the effect is underwhelming. You can't really use them for any First Person Shooter games because the crosshairs on your screen are also adjusted for each eye and the real impact point will be directly between them. Also, many games mix solids with planes, so for example the hallway will look 3-D but all the people in it will look like flat carboard cut-outs. The road will be 3-d but all the trees on the side will be flat. It turned out to be a far LESS immersive experience. I played with it for a couple days, then packed it away with other unused computer junk.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Only at 1 pixel by 1 pixel black-and-clear resolution, per eye.
...
Are you saying there are 3d devices that DON'T require stereoscopic vision?
Also, those that are dominant in one eye, even severely so, still have a sense of depth perception better than if they only had one eye.
yet...
WWJD? JWRTFA!
The funny part is just how many anti-globalization peaceniks who hate the militray would just cream their Guatamalen pants to play with these, I guess military stuff is bad, unless you find it entertaining.
;P
It's not the technology itself, but the use, I think.
Using this kind of tech to train people to kill other people more efficiently is possibly objectionable, while using it to "enhance" people's experience in a game, killing simulated digital avatars of other people is okay
Crud, already can't get to the site. Well here is some information not included in the article...
Here is a image of what the[begin image]
[end image]
Are you bovilexic? Moo!
"Will it let you see the"
The what? Will it let me see the what? maybe you hit Submit to early?
From page 3 of the review:
"I would defiantly advice of wearing in a dark room, with nobody in sight,..."
I'm all for this "pubishing power to the people" meme but jeepers, can't they get someone to at least give it a once-over for stuff like this? Sloppy.
But to be fair, the review is well-done. Just poorly edited.
My
Limekiller
ok, I swear I thought that said "anus glasses".
i really need some sleep.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Ah well, I can always dream and complain ;)
My ASUS glasses work nicely with pretty much any openGL game ... that I've tried. My current system is old enough that much past Quake 2 and it won't run worth beans. Looks nice in Q2 though, but a little headache-inducing.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I know that early efforts at 3-d glasses resulted in serious depth perception problems (i.e. 15 minutes of play would take many hours of recovery time). This resulted in a large number of traffic accidents by the beta testers as they went home after testing. Any such problems with these reported? If not, how did they get around them?
I just emailed sales@edimensional.com asking if they had Linux support. If anyone else is interested, take a few minutes to email them and let them know. I don't think they sell enough of these devices that they can afford Linux users with money to spend. Well? What r u waiting for?
these revamped version of the glasses seem to offer much more value and compatibility to the table.
The correct metaphor would have been "seem to bring much more value and compatibily to the table." I only harp on this because the phrase as it stands doesn't make any sense. "Offer" much more value and compatibility to the table? Is the table your god?
Don't even get me started on the grammar in the rest of the post. I guess lousy communication skills and making yourself look like a fool are the standard on slashdot.
Nathan's blog
Hi,
:-)
I'm surprised this article was posted. Looking at the website its basically a shopping site -- this is a "editorial" advertisement. Not too mention 3, read em, 3 pop-unders.
Is Slashdot getting a cut? I sure hope so
Winton
The 3D effects is only possible because the games render two different points of view, and the glasses sync to the monitor and make sure each eye only sees the point of view it should be seeing.
Some graphics cards come with a 3D-glasses port (which is basically just a sync signal), others sync directly to the VGA connection. Technically it's even possible to sync to the screen, without any connection (but there's no point in doing that here, since the connection is easily available).
Either way, they work fine as long as your monitor can refresh at a decent speed (remember, each eye will only see half the images, so if the monitor is doing 100 Hz, each eye is seeing 50) and your graphics card can render the frames fast enough (same thing - if the card renderes 100 FPS, each eye will only see 50). Also, these glasses only work if vsync is on (ie, frame updates must be synchronised with monitor refresh), so if you're used to about 70 FPS at 100 Hz, you will now see only 50 FPS in double-buffered games, which means each eye will only see 25.
So if you really want to use this for games, make sure your monitor can do at least 120 Hz at the resolution you're planning to use (150 Hz or above would be preferable), and make sure your graphics card can surpass that frame rate at that resolution. Otherwise, you're in for some serious headaches.
Also, your graphics driver must have support for 3D glasses (ie, they must be able to shift the point of view in alternate frames in 3D applications). Fortunately, most drivers do.
Finally, eDimensional claim you can use their glases to see movies in 3D. This is obviously not true. Or rather, you will see some "depth effects", but they will obvioulsy not match the real depth of the original images. And when the depth effect from stereoscopic view clashes with the depth effect from spatial perception, you are very likely to get a major headache, which is your brain's way of saying "I refuse to process this junk".
RMN
~~~
I saw Wil Wheaton as the host of an infomercial for some X3D glasses last night, looks like the same thing that these are. Unfortunately, they only work under windows, and only work with an Nvidia card.
Right now, these look like novelty items, however, what do you think it would be like if your windowing system had 3d support? OSX already has some cool transparency features, which might make a 3d gui more cool. Windows on top could float in air, and minimized windows could be sitting deep inside the screen with different depths depending on what's on top of them. You could probably do some other cool effects too. Yeah, it might be novelty, but I'm sure someone can find a good usability enhancement that would use this technology. Right now, most people think real-time transparency is a novelty, but I find it quite useful on my small laptop screen when I want to work in the active window, but see data in a window behind it either for reference or monitoring.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Stereo vision is only noticeable to about 30 feet out. This isnt very impressive when using a pair of 3d glasses looking at objects that are typically farther out, so I would assume that makers of 3d glasses would exaggerate the effect.
What this means is that disparity of two correlated points in the two images is greater than it should be. Your brain determines the distance more based on other cues than stereo disparity. So when it gets confliciting signals about the distance of an object your eyes have a hard time adjusting their inward tilt(to increase the overlapping visual area), this is sometimes called "eyeball lock in".
The conflicting messages of inward tilt(Brain: "Somthing is close to you Eyes!"), outward tilt (Brain: "Something is farther away Eyes!") make the eye muscles try and do the same thing at once and cause strain. Its the same strain of when you put your finger really close to the bridge of your nose and try to concentrate on it. I think this is what causes the headaches.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
I do 3D visualization type stuff at work. We don't actually code the 3D engines however. We just use 3rd party software for rendering the scenes while we concentrate on presenting the data.
Anyway, I wanted to learn to do 3D stereo with OpenGL so I went out, bought the glasses and here's what I found.
The nVidia stereo drivers don't work with the OpenGL stereo on the TNT and TNT2 based cards.
After I bought a GeForce4 4200, here's what I found...
The GeForce4 (and other gaming cards) don't support the quad-buffered stereo I was trying to learn. None of the OpenGL apps I added stereo support for would run in stereo.
The nVidia stereo driver seems to take a normal scene and generate stereo pairs for all the vertices before it renders the scene. I took the code I wrote and removed all the "special" stereo code, and then my applications would run in stereo just fine.
Quake 3 looks great. Quake 2 looks a little better.
DirectX based applications seem to have the stereo reversed and there is no way to switch it. (that I have found yet)
I can play cool games and write OpenGL apps but I still don't have a machine at home to learn quad buffered stereo.
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
...there's a much cheaper option. nVidia provides drivers that will render scenes in full-color anaglyph so you can dig out your old red/cyan glasses and run the latest 3d (and oldest) 3d games in real 3d. The drivers work for any program that does the 3d math correctly in opengl or direct3d. I have yet to come across a program that doesn't work with them.
Sure, the image looks a little funky, and the framerate is half what it normally is, but you get this with any 3d scheme that uses a normal crt monitor. The glasses they talk about in this article also effectively halve the frame rate by halving the refresh rate per eye so you'll have to deal with quite a bit of flicker. Unless you can run your monitor at 1024x768 @ 120Hz vertical refresh, be prepared to run at lower resolutions. Oh yeah: page flipping 3d doesn't work very well with lcd monitors, so if you have a flat screen you're out of luck unless you want to go anaglyph.
http://www.prescoinc.com/high_speed/heads_up.htm :-)
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
As a one-eyed freak since about birth, I have to tell you that I am
.)
amazed at the amount of time you multi-eyed folks have wasted on
3d perception.
About the only problem I've ever noticed with the 2d world is missing baseline jumpers, a few tough pool shots,
and a lack of desire for huge breasts
Hell, they even had a Seinfeld about multi-eyed folks wasting time on those darn 3d pictures.
Remember George coming out of the bathroom with his shirt off in the middle of that party?
?sp